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Introduction

Gabriele Durbeck, Urte Stobbe,Hubert Zapf, and Evi Zemanek

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Ecocritical literary and cultural studies in the twentieth century are charac-terized by two apparently opposite but in fact interrelated tendencies. Onetendency is the rapidly increasing globalization of the field, which started outas a regional phenomenon in the Anglo-American world in the later part ofthe twentieth century and has meanwhile become one of the most productiveparadigms in literature and culture departments across the planet. The othertendency is the growing awareness and scholarly articulation of the enor-mous diversity and the distinct contributions of various cultures to ecologicalknowledge. The first tendency reflects a powerful dynamics of ecologicalthought to cross-regional, national, and cultural boundaries and to foregroundthe transnational and transcultural nature of all ecological processes withinthe framework of the planetary ecosystem. The second tendency reflects anequally forceful counter-dynamics within the new paradigm to foreground thehistorical distinctness and cultural uniqueness of all intellectual and artisticexpressions of ecological thought. While the first tendency emphasizes thepotency of transnationally shared knowledge and artistic communicationabout ecological issues across historical-cultural boundaries, the secondaccentuates the irreducible difference of all forms of ecological knowledgedue to their embeddedness in specific experiential, linguistic, and culturalcontexts.

The relationship between these tendencies can be interpreted in differentways. One, it can be seen as a mutually exclusionary opposition betweenincompatible perspectives, one insisting on the necessity to bring differ-ent ecological knowledge cultures into conversation with each other with aview to the global impact and significance of ecological processes, the otherexplicitly resisting this drive toward homogenizing globalization by empha-sizing the radical heterogeneity and ultimate untranslatability of different

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ecological cultures. Two, it can be seen as a subordinating relationship, inwhich the diversity of particular cultures is taken into account only insofaras they contribute to a globally shared ecological discourse; or in which, viceversa, transnational and transcultural implications are subordinated to thesingularity of particular ecological knowledge cultures. Three, it can be seenas a relationship of equally valid and mutually complementary tendencies,which only in their fully acknowledged, even though paradoxical, coag-ency can bring out the best of current ecocultural scholarship. In this view,both the recognition of inevitable connectivity and of irreducible diversity ismandatory in assessing the relation between different ecological knowledgecultures. On an epistemic level, this corresponds to the fundamental structureof all ecological thought, which is defined in the polarity between potentiallyinfinite connectivity and potentially infinite diversity.

The present book Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture, inaccordance with the Ecocritical Theory and Practice series of which it is part, isbased on the latter interpretation. It is the aim of this book to offer a systematicsurvey and analysis of the characteristic contributions of German literature andculture to the evolution of ecological thought and writing both on a nationaland a transnational scale. In this sense, the book attempts both to do justice tothe specific features of ecological thought in German-speaking cultures and toassess its most important and influential contributions to a globalizing ecocriti-cal discourse. These contributions, while offering unique perspectives on therelationship between human culture and the nonhuman world, have never beenrestricted to national boundaries. A long history and cross-cultural evolution ofproto-ecological thought has preceded and enabled the emergence of the char-acteristic forms and directions of German ecological thought, which in turn hashad considerable impact on developments in other literary and intellectual cul-tures. The textual, scientific, and artistic manifestations of ecologically inspiredthought in German-speaking cultures have always been intertextually andtransnationally connected, and have, in fact, already become part of the largerfield ofecocritical theory and practice in many ways. Goethe and the romantics,the German philosophy of nature culminating in Schelling, the explorationsand writings of Alexander van Humboldt, the legacy of the Frankfurt CriticalTheory, the phenomenological tradition from Heidegger to Gemot Bohme sphilosophical aesthetics of nature, or Ulrich Beck's concept of the world risksociety, are but a few hallmark examples of this dialogic exchange and mutuallyenriching reception process, which has been significantly intensified recently(cf. Goodbody/Rigby 2011; Zapf 2016). What is more, German ecologicalthought is in itself by no means a monolithic phenomenon but consists of a plu-rality of different developments, ideas, directions, and approaches. It thereforegoes without saying that it is only some of the most important of these that weare able to represent in the chapters of this book.

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One problem related to the question of cultural difference and transculturalcommonalities in ecological communication is the problem of translation. Tothe extent that ecological thought, like all literary and intellectual phenomena,is deeply rooted in and mediated by language, its translation into other lan-guages, especially into English as the globally dominant language of scienceand scholarship, entails the danger of losing its distinctive features. StephaniePosthumus (2011) has made this argument with a view to the French andfrancophone traditions of ecological thought which, as she insists, are insepa-rably bound up with their linguistic and culture-specific semiotic contextand can therefore only be translated at a considerable price. It is our viewthat there is an important, even though only partial, truth in this observation,which must be taken seriously in all such attempts as the present one. Thisbook, too, is after all also such an act of translation, both in terms of languageand of culture. We have tried to take account of this residual paradox, that is,the project of translating what can never be adequately translated in its fullrichness and semiotic complexity, in two ways: We are including the Ger-man original in all quotations from literary and artistic sources; and we havekept the original German expressions whenever certain terms are actuallyuntranslatable into English, hoping that their meaning will nevertheless beindirectly accessible through the argument and semantic context. At the sametime, it is our conviction that key ecological ideas, concepts, and aestheticprinciples can be effectively communicated beyond the ineradicable linguis-tic and cultural differences. Indeed, we believe that in the act of translation,something is not only lost but also gained, because the mutual transferencebetween linguistic and semiotic codes involved in the process of translationopens up new spaces in between languages and cultures that offer sharedsites of exploration, reflection, and intellectual and artistic exchange betweenotherwise separated ecological knowledge cultures.

The present book is among the first of its kind to attempt such a survey.Previous volumes on the subject were mostly dedicated to special areas,thematic domains, and historical periods of German ecological thought. In1997, Colin Riordan edited the first anthology on Green Thought in GermanCulture, which covers a wide-ranging and eclectic selection of topics begin-ning with nineteenth-century bourgeois conservatism, ecosocialism, and thedark time of Nazism, and moving on to trends of the later twentieth centurylike the Frankfurt School, early ecofeminist ideas, "new age mysticism,"and more radical green ideas such as the advocacy of eco-dictatorship. Thebook explores the role of writers, artists, and cultural actors "in disseminat-ing, elaborating and criticizing green ideas" (Riordan 1997: ix) in postwarGerman-language literature on ecological disasters and catastrophism, andfeatures essays pn such diverse topics as the Bildungsroman, eco-crime thrill-ers, and the eco-aesthetics of Joseph Beuys and filmmaker Werner Herzog.

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Axel Goodbody's edited book from 1998, Literatur und Okologie, gives arepresentative survey of German prose and poetry from the 1970s onward byleading contemporary authors such as Heinrich Boll, Volker Braun, H. M.Enzensberger, Franz Fuhmann, Giinter Grass, Elfriede Jelinek, Wulf Kirsten,Giinter Kunert, Heiner Muller, and Christa Wolf. Another collection, Okolo-gie und Literatur (2000), edited by Peter Morris-Keitel and Michael Nie-dermeier, goes further back in history and offers a broad spectrum of essaysacross various issues of ecology and German culture, while only selectivelytouching on questions of literature and literary history. The anthology Okolo-gische Transformationen und literarische Reprasentationen (2010), edited byMaren Ermisch, Ulrike Kruse, and Urte Stobbe, brings together environmen-tal research with literary research on German and American literature fromthe perspective of ecocriticism.

A new approach to the academic study of ecology and literature in Europewas provided by the book Natur — Kultur—Text (2005), edited by CatrinGersdorf and Sylvia Mayer. After summarizing the development of ecocriti-cism in the United States and Britain, the two editors reflect the reasons whyecological thinking has been taken up belatedly in German academia, empha-sizing the lack of a nature writing tradition on the one hand and the misappre-hension of a mere ecological realism limited to didactic and political reasonson the other. At the same time, they point to the important role of Germanthinkers and theories such as the literary anthropology by Wolfgang Iser, theevolutionary cultural ecology by Peter Finke, and the functional model ofliterature as cultural ecology by Hubert Zapf, for a new theoretical funda-ment to ecocriticism in Europe. Against this background, Goodbody's bookon Nature, Technology and Cultural Change in Twentieth-Century GermanLiterature (2007) explores the role of literary and symbolic representations ofGerman environmental thought, drawing a line from Goethe as an importantpredecessor of environmentalism to authors in the first half of the twentiethcentury (Georg Kaiser, Oskar Loerke, Otto Alscher, Paul Gurk et al.) and towriters in the 1970s (Adolf Muschg, Hanns Cibulka, Klaus Modick, VolkerBraun et al.). Goodbody also considers the ambivalent position of Germanyas a nation and an agent of modernity, technological development, and opti-mistic belief in progress on the one hand, and a "home to powerful traditionsof cultural pessimism and [. . .] atavistic tendencies in politics" (xi) on theother, raising the question in this context of the role of creative imagining "asa counter-discourse to hegemonic, scientific-rationalist conceptions of natureand our relationship with it" (xiv). Additionally, Goodbody deploys the spe-cific traditions of critical theory (Adorno), aesthetics of nature (Gernot andHartmut Bohme), and cultural ecology (Finke, Zapf).

On this fundament, Goodbody's essay on "German Ecocriticism" (2014,cf. 2015) certainly provides the hitherto most comprehensive overview of the

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field. It surveys numerous studies on individual aspects of German (proto-)ecological thinking, tracing its historic roots back to the romantic periodand the rich philosophical and scientific traditions in the nineteenth century,and also presenting the relevant historical steps and major topics of laterdevelopments. Goodbody filters out two theoretical strands of recent Ger-man ecocriticism: on the one hand, hermeneutics, critical theory, and culturalanthropology leading up to an "aesthetics of nature" (Gernot Bohme); on theother, the connection between cultural ecology, systems theory, and literaryanalysis, which Hubert Zapf has proposed in his monograph Literatur alskulturelle Okologie (2002) and his edited essay collection Kulturokologieund Literatur (2008). Zapf's approach of cultural ecology with the triadicfunctional model of literary discourse has been adopted in many ways by crit-ics like Sieglinde Grimm and Berbeli Wanning (2016) who include culturalecology in the field of didactics and teaching German literature.

The first German-speaking introduction to ecocriticism, Ecocriticism.Eine Einfiihrung (2015), edited by Gabriele Durbeck and Urte Stobbe, offersan interdisciplinary overview of central theoretical perspectives and trans-nationally relevant approaches such as eco-cosmopolitism, biosemiotics,eco-feminism, new materialism, cultural animal studies, postcolonial eco-criticism, cultural ecology, critical theory, and the cultural discourse on theAnthropocene. The book also integrates environmental history and environ-mental movements in Germany and presents a survey of different genres suchas pastoral and bucolic literature, nature poetry, climate change novel andecothrillers, but also drama and theatre as well as children and young adultfiction and, last but not least, film studies and environmental art. BenjaminBiihler's German introduction Ecocriticism: Grundlagen — Theorien — Inter-pretationen (2016) begins with a survey on ecological thought and culturalhistory since the early modem period in Europe and sketches the develop-ment of ecocriticism, followed by a digest of German literary history from theeighteenth century to contemporary dystopian literature that consists mostlyof a rereading of canonical authors from an ecocritical perspective. In thelast part, Buhler addresses more general topics such as ecological space anddwelling, ecological narratives and genres, or ecological risks, disruptions,and disasters. In her book German Culture and the Modern EnvironmentalImagination, Sabine Wilke suggests a "framework for conceptualizing envi-ronmental literary scholarship within the German philosophical tradition" ofKant, romantic nature philosophy, Nietzsche's aesthetic theory, and Adorno'scritical theory (Wilke 2015: 15); it also takes a postcolonial inflection of eco-criticism into account. Her investigation of a new concept of landscape in nar-rating and depicting nature by the explorers Georg Forster and Alexander vonHumboldt, the painters Caspar David Friedrich and Albert Bierstadt, and thefilmmakers Lehi Riefenstahl and Werner Herzog, aims to highlight a specific

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German tradition in environmental thinking "dedicated to the emergence ofa European-style ecocriticism" (ibid.: 16). Two further books on ecologicalthinking in German literature are forthcoming this year. The book on GermanEcocriticism in the Anthropocene (ed. by Schaumann/Sullivan 2017) comple-ments ecocritical studies emerging from North America and Britain witha specifically German-studies perspective on canonical and noncanonica]German-language texts and films, beginning with Goethe and the romanticsand extending into the twenty-first century. Evi Zemanek's book OkologischeGenres (2017) focuses on the question how environmental transformationshave led and currently lead to genre transformations and the emergence ofnew genres in reaction to ecological crises. The book analyzes the ecologi-cal potential, for example the affinities to (proto-)ecological discourses andecological text structures, of many genres which have not yet received muchattention in ecocritical studies, such as German idyll, castaway story, gothicnovel, risk narrative, diary, travelogue, guidebook, testimonial, and ecologi-cal science fiction. It discusses both genres that prevail in various cultures aswell as genres that developed in a very specific cultural context.

Against this background, and building on previous work in the field, thepresent book aims to present a cutting-edge overview of some of the mostrelevant and influential manifestations of ecological thought in German litera-ture and culture. While being aware of the necessary limitations of selection,space, and personal preference, the collection nevertheless attempts to be asrepresentative and informative as possible both about the historical evolutionand the contemporary manifestations of German ecological thought acrossdifferent disciplines, domains of culture, and genres of discourse. We havetried to cover those developments and manifestations that offer particularlyrich examples of ecological thought in German literature, philosophy, science,and art, examples that represent milestones in its evolution, and examples thathave had and continue to have a visible impact in the ecocritical communityboth nationally and internationally. While special emphasis is placed on thecontribution of literature and the arts, the book covers contributions from abroad spectrum of disciplines ranging from philosophy to geography andenvironmental history, from ecological science to different genres and mediaof ecological communication.

Along the lines of these considerations, the book is structured into fiveparts. The first part, "Proto-Ecological Thought," deals with early but influ-ential manifestations of emergent ecological thought from the sixteenth tothe nineteenth century. It starts with a contribution by Anke Kramer on thecultural history of the four elements. Kramer differentiates four contexts inwhich the elements became relevant—as scientific knowledge, as occult andmagical knowledge, as medical and anthropological knowledge, and as anaesthetic model in literature and the arts—arguing that the theory of the four

elements and "the questions and problems it raises form an essential basisof today's ecological thought" (chapter 1). She traces the history of the fourelements from antiquity to the early modern period; zooms in on Paracelsus'snotion of animated elements as a pivotal point in the emergence both ofmodern chemistry and of ecological thought; and finally demonstrates theircontinued significance as a creative source for fictionalizing the elements inthe literature of romanticism and beyond. In this history of creative receptionand transformation, as Kramer demonstrates, the elements become an aes-thetic agency in literary texts that transcends a narrow anthropocentrism andresonates with the forces of agentic matter.

In her contribution on Goethe's concept of nature, Heather Sullivan arguesthat Goethe's work is proto-ecological in the sense that it overcomes theinherited dualism between culture and nature toward an awareness of their"complex and inextricable interdependence" (chapter 2). Sullivan begins withbriefly tracing the scholarly reception of Goethe, which led from the assump-tion of an idealized wholeness to a recognition of the importance of scienceand naturalism in his concept of nature. She then analyzes the ambivalencesof experiencing nature in Goethe's early novel Werther, juxtaposing it withits ironic counterpart Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit (Triumph of Senti-mentality), and pointing out that the contrast between nurturing^enevolentversus threatening/chaotic aspects of nature is not just a mirror of the pro-tagonist's inner state but a sign of the reciprocal, participatory interaction ofhuman and nonhuman forces. In this sense, in Goethe's Farbenlehre (Theoryof Colors), color and light are likewise conceived as neither merely objectivenor subjective but as interactive, co-emergent phenomena. Finally, Sullivanlooks anew at the famous ending of Goethe's Faust and reinterprets Faust'sfinal ascent to heaven not just as a metaphysical but a materially contextual-ized event, which includes geomorphic and meteorological processes such asair, water, and cloud in an intricately interwoven, open-ended movement thatcorrelates rather than separates soul and body, mind and matter in complexforms of entanglement.

Kate Rigby examines this proto-ecological contribution of major writersof the Goethezeit in their role as antecedents of modern biosemiotics andecotheology. In her chapter "Nature, Language, and Religion: Herder andBeyond," she explores the hitherto underresearched prehistory of biosemi-otics and ecotheology in the influential figure of Johann Gottfried Herder,eminent biblical theologian and theorist of language of his age. Herder's cre-ati ve reception of Spinoza and the latter's doctrine of the immanent presenceof the divine, according to Rigby, "lies at the heart of German romanticismand idealism, contributing decisively to their proto-ecological dimension"(chapter 3). Consequently, in his readings of the Bible, Herder adopts ahistorical-criti'Cal and poetological view of the sacred scriptures and places

XX Introduction

them in the socio-environmental contexts of their historical conditions oforigin. At the same time, he liberates the concept of nature both from dog-matic theological restrictions and from mechanistic models of Enlightenmentrationalism by interpreting Spinoza's natura naturans as an active force inex-tricably interlinking humans with each other and the more-than-human worldin a communicative process of continuous becoming and co-emergence. Inhis Abhandlung fiber den Ursprung der Sprache (Treatise on the Origin ofLanguage), Herder combines the biosemiotic and ecotheological strands ofthis proto-ecological thought. In his concept of Natursprache, he traces a pri-mal natural language which closely connects words and things and is the mostancient origin of language and poetry; as such, it also forms the most deeplyexpressive and valid passages of the Hebrew Bible. In his impact on Goetheand Schelling, as well as on Charles Sanders Peirce and Jakob van Uexkull,Herder marks a line of biosemiotic thought that is still relevant today, asRigby argues, and that still needs to enter into a more explicit dialogue withthe ecotheological branch of that tradition.

In the subsequent chapter, Berbeli Wanning compares two landmark fig-ures of German romantic thought and literature, Schelling and Novalis, asrepresentatives of proto-ecological thought in an unparalleled move in philo-sophical history. Schelling ascribes to art and poetry a superior capacity tounderstand nature in comparison with science and philosophy. Nature itselfis equivalent to a poem, which can achieve the reintegration of subject andobject, spirit and matter, and conscious mind and unconscious nature that areseparated in science and cultural practice. Novalis, who like Schelling wasscientifically well-versed, likewise assumed a closer kinship of poetry to thenatural world than science but goes beyond Schelling in ascribing an addi-tional, magical dimension to poetry. As Wanning demonstrates for examplein Novalis's novel fragment Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (The Novices at Sais),this magical dimension enables poetry to escape the determinism of externallaws and at the same time to move more deeply into the internal workingsof nature's creative processes. As Wanning points out, both figures have leftan important legacy for modern ecocriticism: While Schelling anticipatesinsights of material ecology in his conception of the agency of matter, Nova-lis anticipates the ecological force of the poetic imagination in synthesizingalienated and split up fragments of a rationalistic civilization.

As the next chapter in this section, Caroline Schaumann's contributionis dedicated to a singular, cosmopolitan figure and pioneer of ecologicalthought, Alexander van Humboldt. In his incessant activities of travels, writ-ings, and scientific endeavors, Humboldt crossed the boundaries of nations,languages, genres, and disciplines. He became "one of the world's first timeGeologists" in that he "did not limit himself to one single subject matter butpaid attention to the organic and nonorganic, human and nonhuman, thereby

Introduction xxi

working in fields labeled today as geology, geography, meteorology, biology,physiology, and anthropology" (chapter 5). Conceiving of the world as adynamic interweaving of active forces, he anticipated the modern ecologi-cal idea of interactive networks as a fundamental feature of the global webof life of which individual phenomena were an intrinsic part. His writings,among which his massive Kosmos stands out as his opus magnum, consists ofgenerically hybrid forms combining narration, travelogue, scientific excursus,philosophical reflection, visual illustration, and extensive footnotes. In them,he already pointed out the first symptoms of the global environmental chal-lenges of the Anthropocene—deforestation, desertification, species depletion,and climate change. Schaumann concludes her chapter by observing that afterlong neglect, Humboldt's reception has dramatically intensified in recentyears, shifting from a critique of his alleged colonialist perspective in thetwentieth century to a broadscale revaluation in the twenty-first century ofhis acceptance of cultural otherness that ties up with his pioneer role for thetransdisciplinary environmental humanities.

The second part of the book, "Theoretical Approaches," opens with a chap-ter on Martin Heidegger's critique of technology by Silvio Vietta. Heideggerhas been an important, if controversial reference for ecocritics. While hisconcept of poetic dwelling has been well received, for example, in JonathanBate's Song of the Earth (2000), his affinity to National Socialism has led torather skeptical responses. Vietta argues in reference to the Black Notebooksthat Heidegger s alleged anti-Semitism should be understood not as evidenceof his racism but as part of his fundamental critique of occidental rationalismand metaphysics, which Heidegger, according to Vietta, extends to all formsof modem power structures over humans and nature. Philosophically datingback to the Greeks and being most influentially conceptualized by Descartes,the split between subject and object, thought and experience, man and natureled to a Seinsvergessenheit, a forgetting of Being in the epistemic-techno-logical architecture of modern civilization which Heidegger diagnoses in hisSein und Zeit (Being and Time). This fatal split, together with its alienatingeffects, was accompanied by an overriding will to power that became mostforcibly manifest in totalitarian systems such as National Socialism or Sovietcommunism. Yet this alienation, as Vietta interprets Heidegger's views, isultimately due to the all-dominating role of an objectifying science and tech-nology, which has moved away from the knowledge of a common "being-in-the-world" that humans share with other beings in a planetary context.

Another powerful precursor of and influence on ecocritical thought in Ger-many and beyond is the Frankfurt School, as Timo Muller demonstrates in hischapter. Focusing on Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, Muller singlesout two importMit directions in which their reflections have become relevantto ecocriticism—the language of nature and the aesthetics of nature. To

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Benjamin, things have a language comparable to humans, with the differencethat human language involves an act of naming which has its metaphysicalfoundation in the divine, whereas the language of nonhuman things is muteyet has its own forms of communication. Within this rather anthropocen-trie framing, however, the material world is ascribed semiotic agency and"actively communicates itself to man" (chapter 7). The task of interpretationand the arts is the "translation" of this mute language of things into humancommunication. Theodor Adorno's aesthetics of nature is more dialecticaland constructivist. If Benjamin traces the alienation of man from nature to thetechnologization of society, Adorno sees it already implied in the "very actof human self-awareness," which places man as a subject apart from natureand prevents any direct return to immediacy, thus anticipating contemporarystrands of construcdvist ecocriticism. However, beyond its cultural mediated-ness Adorno also affirms the real material existence of nature as a principle ofnonidentity that especially manifests itself in the aesthetic processes of art. Assuch, nature becomes a force in culture which resists instrumental reason anddestabilizes the structures of domination based on it. In this dialectical, bothmaterialist and constructivist approach, Adorno influenced developments incontemporary ecocriticism ranging from ecological aesthetics to environmen-tal ethics, and from constructivist ecocriticism to cultural ecology.

Going against the grain of material and posthumanist ecocriticism,Angelika Krebs presents her own philosophical take on environmental ethicsand aesthetics. Focusing on the beauty of landscapes as a "necessary constitu-ent of a good human life," Krebs argues for the "eudemonic intrinsic value ofnature" as opposed to the assumption of its intrinsic moral value or its merelyinstrumental value (chapter 8). Calling for overcoming a "shallow traditionalanthropocentrism," she nevertheless also rejects the complete surrendering ofthe difference between the human and the nonhuman domains in some ver-sions of contemporary ecological thought, pleading instead for what she callsa "deep humanism." In a logical-classificatory mode, Krebs positions her-self within different possible approaches to the aesthetics of landscape, andexplains the reasons for environmental ethics than can be derived from it. Thefocal points around which she arranges her eudemonic argument are beauty,identity, and atmosphere, all of which contributing to a powerful effect offeeling "at home" in the world. These concepts describe synaesthetic reso-nances between the shifting qualities of landscapes and the embodied lives ofhuman beings, which require the cooperation of philosophy and literature tobring out their full ethical potential, as Krebs demonstrates in a concludinginterpretation of a contemporary poetic text, Michael Donhauser's Varia-tionen in Prosa {Variations in Prose).

As an antidote to a self-repeating rhetoric of crisis and all-too-emphaticdeclarations of a new ontology, Hannes Bergthaller outlines the implications

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of Niklas Luhmann's theory of social systems for ecological thought. Byconceptualizing society as an internally differentiated, self-organizing systemembedded in system-specific environments, this theory provides a rigor-ously ecological, non-anthropocentric account of social evolution, as wellas a compelling explanation for the development of environmental move-ments over the past fifty years. These movements failed to reckon with thefunctional differentiation of modern society, which strictly circumscribes itsability to generate resonance in response to changes in its ecological environ-ment. Bergthaller argues that recent attempts to articulate new ontologies asa foundation for an ecological politics are likely to share the same fate. Thesystems theoretical perspective he introduces suggests that the discourse ofecological crisis has reached a point of exhaustion, and that different forms ofobserving ecological problems may be needed. He considers the recent turntoward the Anthropocene as an indicator that the search for such alternativesis already underway.

In his chapter on "Risk Theory," Benjamin Buhler discusses three theoreti-cal models of risk theory, which he correlates with three aspects of ecologicalrisk already anticipated in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring — risk as caused byhuman-made decisions; as involving irreversible damage and costs that noinsurance can cover; and as a side effect of the process of modernization.The first aspect is addressed in Niklas Luhmann's systems theory, in whichhe raises the problem to a meta-level by distinguishing between danger andrisk, "danger" designating the assumption of an inevitable fate as character-istic of premodern societies, "risk" the partially unforeseeable consequencesof human agency as a result of the multiplication of decision options in anincreasingly complex modern society. The modern concept of risk thereforeinvolves not only risk prevention but risk management, as Buhler illustrateswith reference to the dyke building project in Theodor Storm' s Der Schimmel-reiter (The Rider on the White Horse). The second aspect is theorized in Fran-gois Ewald's contextualization of risk in technologies of power, in which theeconomic and mercantile dimensions of risk are foregrounded, and in whichsociety itself is defined as the "insurance" of people against the uncertaintiesof economic risks. The most influential theory of risk in ecocritical studies,however, has been the third that Biihler discusses; Ulrich Beck's concept ofa risk society that is based on his notion of reflexive modernization. Thisconcept focuses not on the human and technological use of nature as suchbut on the problems resulting from the techno-economic development itselfin terms of its unintended, potentially hazardous side effects. In its extensionto the theory of a World Risk Society, Beck envisages a planetary dimensionof risk and of its unequal distribution around the world that has influencedimportant strands of contemporary eco-globalism and eco-cosmopolitanism.His observation that the anticipation of inherently catastrophic but necessarily

xxiv Introduction

uncertain future scenarios makes life in a world risk society "both real andunreal" entails an increased importance of narrative, imaginary, and artisticstagings of such scenarios, as they have proliferated in recent literature, film,and media.

In the concluding chapter of the section, Hubert Zapf presents the trans-disciplinary approach of cultural ecology. As he points out, cultural ecologyresonates both with transnational ideas from Anglo-American thinkers suchas Gregory Bateson and Charles Sanders Peirce, and with a genealogy ofGer-man ecological thought reaching from Naturphilosophie to phenomenology,the Frankfurt School, ecological aesthetics, up to Peter Finke's evolutionarycultural ecology and Wolfgang Iser's literary anthropology. As a specifictheory of the cultural function of imaginative texts, a cultural ecology ofliterature combines the insights of general cultural ecology with insightsof literary theory and aesthetics and indeed of the literary texts themselves,which are seen as representing a distinctive form of ecocultural knowledgeand communication in their own right. In their narrative embodiment andimaginative transgression of inherited binaries between mind and body,human and nonhuman nature, literary texts in this view act like an ecologi-cal force in the larger system of cultural discourses. Zapf exemplifies this ina comparison between Rilke's Birth of Venus and Kafka's Metamorphosis,in which the age-old principle of literary metamorphosis works in differentways: as the biophilic emergence of human from nonhuman life in Rilke, andas the biophobic deformation of human into nonhuman life in Kafka. At theend, Zapf describes his triadic functional model of cultural ecology, which,in accordance with Peirce and Iser, moves away from a binary toward a tri-adic, relational, and transformative concept of the sign and the text. Its threedimensions of culture-critical metadiscourse, imaginative counter-discourse,and reintegrative interdiscourse are illustrated, besides American examples,in Goethe's Faust and Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus.

The third section of the book gives a brief overview on central themesand issues of environmental history in Germany. The first chapter focuseson risks and disasters, one of the well-established research fields of environ-mental history in Germany. In his contribution "Representation of NaturalCatastrophes: Floods, Droughts, and Earthquakes," Francois Walter exploresthe link between environmental and cultural history. He stresses that it canbe often observed as a coexistence of rational and religious interpretationsof natural phenomena from the seventeenth to twentieth century. On the onehand, disasters were interpreted as divine punishment, and on the other hand,philosophers like Leibniz conceived the world created by God as "the bestof all possible worlds." Apocalyptic visions, however, are primarily found inthe context of large-scale man-made disasters like wars and also in the con-text of nuclear catastrophes. During the 1970s this connection shifted to the

Introduction XXV

environment. Concerning acid rain, the fear of Waldsterben (forest dieback),and other climate or nuclear disasters, a fundamental pessimistic attitudeleads to a kind of end-of-the-worid hysteria during the 1980s. As Walterargues, science and literature also participated in this complex phenomenonof catastrophism and the cultivation of crisis in German culture.

Martin Bemmann 's essay analyzes how forest damages were discussed byscientists, state authorities, companies, and private actors in the late nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries. Due to growing industrialization, airpollution and damage to vegetation caused by sewage, dust, soot, ashes, andgases became a clearly visible environmental problem in the time around1900. Bemmann firstly concentrates on the difficulties to rate the forest dam-ages exactly since reliable information like reports and testimonies of forestdamages were missing during the investigation period. A crucial problem wasto state the exact extent of damages because it was impossible to prove causallinks between air pollution and vegetational harms. In the second, main partof the article, Bemmann analyzes the different patterns of arguments andproposed solutions that social groups such as property owners, scientists andtechnicians, legal experts, state authorities, and conservationists developed.He shows that each of them interpreted damages in a different way and thusformulated various strategies to mitigate or circumvent the problems depend-ing on financial interests, existing laws, or available knowledge. The articlefinishes with considerations on transnational entanglements and the necessityto reflect the given assumptions of industrial pollution in historiography.

The subsequent chapter "Cultural Landscapes in Germany—Continuities,Ruptures, and Stewardship" by Werner Konold gives a differentiated over-view of the huge variety of landscapes in Germany. Cultural landscapesdiffer not only in climatic, geological, geomorphological, hydrographic, andvegetational ecological characteristics, but also with respect to territorial his-tory, religious denomination, settlement history, house forms, agriculturalstructures, rural transportation structures, and land improvements, to namebut a few. Thus, the term "cultural landscapes" is more appropriate than justthe term "landscape." Konold emphasizes that a combination of differentfactors leads to identity, familiarity, and regional awareness of the inhabit-ants or visitors who often evaluate changes in landscape as a loss. Therefore,he draws attention to the fact that all landscapes are culturally "grown" and,thus, change is a constitutive factor of landscapes. What looks "natural" is infact mostly human-made, be it intentionally as in landscape parks, or by dif-ferent means of land use. These historical changes and traces are in the mainfocus of the essay, which pleads for a new view on what we call rupture andcontinuity in landscapes. The question is how these changes were seen informer times and which processes lead to the specific value attributed also tolesser known f&gions. A deeper knowledge of landscape formation processes

xx vi Introduction Introduction xxvii

and an awareness of the historicity of cultural landscapes are therefore neces-sary to enable a more positive view of recent and forthcoming changes.

Richard Hold's essay gives an overview of nature protection and envi-ronmental movements in Germany since 1900. In accordance with recentresearch, Holzl distinguishes between three phases of development that showdifferent intellectual characteristics and sociocultural structures. The first, theenvironmentalism between 1900 and 1918, was supported mainly by urbanliberal bourgeois elites who followed the idea that the "soul" of the Germannation was formed by characteristic landscapes such as the Alps, the riverRhine, or the coastline of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. The contact withpristine nature was considered the best remedy for typical maladies of urbanindustrialism. In the second phase from the 1920s to the 1960s, the middleclasses developed romantic, conservative, and often chauvinistic ideas ofhomeland (Heimat), for which Holzl suggests the term "home-town envi-ronmentalism." In the 1930s, the amount of (resource) preservation reacheda European scale with the two central debates about close-to-nature forestryand the fear of desertification, which can be interpreted as an ecological turn-ing point in German environmentalism. The third phase, starting in the 1970sand lasting until recent times, can be characterized as environmentalism inthe age of ecology. Alternative bourgeois elites as the main supporters pursuetransnational goals of environmentalism, often using apocalyptic rhetoric andcatchy media campaigns on global problems like chemical pollution, nucleardisasters, and other environmental themes such as Waldsterben, materialrecycling, and renewable energy.

The last chapter in this third section is dedicated to "Substance Stories,"a quite young transdisciplinary and globally oriented research field betweenethnography and history. Jens Soentgen introduces the basic ideas andconsequences of this approach, which sees in substances a central motor ofenvironmental change. Substances are not only passive material of tradingor commercial value—the conventional view on material goods—but shouldbe seen as powerful agencies that transform, diffuse, are (self-)mobile, andexchange with other substances. Thus, substance stories focus on narrationsof how substances are produced, transformed, and moved, but also tell usabout the ways that, for example, oil spreads into the ocean, nitrogen fertilizerand pesticides diffuse into the ground water, and smog distributes in the air.Metaphorically speaking, both, the practices in dealing with materials and theself-activity of substances, can be called the "social life" of substances. Thismetaphor refers to Arjun Appadurai, who spoke of the social life of thingsin 1986. Soentgen criticizes Appadurai's assumption of clearly structured,linear, and logical processes of material exchange. Instead, substance storiestrack the roots of substances around the globe that often show rhizomaticstructures with unforeseen side effects and dissipation processes.

The fourth part of the book is devoted to "Ecocritical Case Studies of Ger-man Literature." Concerning the question which literary genres show a spe-cial focus on human-nature-relations and offer topical scenarios. Anglophoneecocriticial research usually distinguishes between "pastoral" and "apocalyp-dc modes of representation. One of the traditional pastoral models, bucolicpoetry by and in imitation of Theocritus and Virgil, features shepherds in aharmonious relationship with their animals and natural surroundings in anidealized landscape that sharply contrasts with urban life. In his contribu-tion "From Baroque Pastoral to the Idyll," Jakob Heller shows that withinthe productive seventeenth- and eighteenth-century reception of the classicalbucolic tradition, German poetry developed its own pastoral genre varia-tions. At first, the Pegnesischer Blumenorden (the Pegnitz Flower Society),a baroque literary society founded in Nuremberg in 1644, replaced the ratherstandardized imitation of the antique locus amoenus (pleasant place) with anidealized landscape that depicts the real landscape around Nuremberg and aparticular nature in detail, thus referring not solely to literary topoi but to thenatural environment. Later, Salomon GeBner further modified the genre withhis widely read and highly influential Idyllen {Idylls, 1756, 1772) that displayan awareness of the poet's construction of nature, rather than its mere imita-tion. Thereby, Heller argues, they offer a proto-ecological perspective on theinterdependence of man and nature. The essay demonstrates why the idyll isan outstanding genre for ecocritical thought.

Another genre that plays a significant role as a medium for the communica-tion of knowledge about nature as well as for the articulation ofproto-ecologi-cal thought is lyrical nature poetry, as Axel Goodbody shows in his chapter on"German Ecopoetry." Due to the qualities of poetic language, lyrical naturepoetry occupies a special place in writing about nature: by its artful diction,sound, and rhythm, which intensify the expression of ideas and feeling, aswell as by its metaphors and tropes creating a polysemic texture, it appealsto the reader's senses and offers alternative ways of perceiving nature andimagining humans' relationship with it. Drawing on many examples, AxelGoodbody traces a development from "nature poetry" (Naturlyrik) of theeighteenth century that celebrates nature's beauty and the poetic laments overits loss in the nineteenth century, to "environmental poetry" ("Okoiyrik") ofthe later twentieth century, which thematizes ecological crises from a politi-cally engaged perspective, to contemporary ecopoetry, which he calls "poetryin the Anthropocene" ("Lyrik im Anthropozan") that is characterized by itsawareness of humanity's influence on and interdependence with nature andby a resulting sense of global responsibility. Ultimately, Goodbody pointsout the plurality of Anthropocene ecopoetry, which manifests its creativity ina broad spectrum between linguistic and formal experiment, the recycling oftraditional poetic forms, and with an empathetic imagination that gives voice

xxviii Introduction

to the more-than-human. Poetry, Goodbody concludes, fosters ecologicalthinking through its "ability to communicate moments of emotional intensityand insight, building bridges between abstract scientific knowledge and indi-viduals' subjective feelings" (chapter 18).

One recent phenomenon that deserves special attention is German poetsincreasing interest in the elements and their incorporation of ancient elementtheories into their poetry. In her contribution on "Elemental Poetics," EviZemanek shows why two of the most renowned contemporary poets, FranzJosef Czernin and Ulrike Draesner, chose a model that science has long con-sidered an outdated matrix. She explores the common ground between thesetwo elemental poetics and basic ideas of material agency that have recentlybeen (re-)conceptualized under the label of "new materialism" or "mate-rial ecocriticism." A comparison of the elemental poems by Czernin andDraesner reveals similarities and differences. In both poets' texts, the dichot-omy of mind and matter, and of nature and culture, is deconstructed in actsof communication, in which the human subject is replaced by autonomouselements. Thus both poets try to abandon the anthropocentric perspective ina performative way. While in Czemin's poems, the borders between man andhis environment are open to a healthy, natural exchange, Draesner's moreoften describe contaminations, that is, how humans poison their environmentand thereby themselves. For Czemin, the elements serve as media to conveygeneral ideas about nature. Draesner, by contrast, uses them as indicators forprocesses of ecological transformation. Hence, the two poets seem to advo-cate contrasting positions: Czernin implies the calm certainty that man willbe outlived by nature anyway, whereas Draesner alerts us to man's influenceon the elements and reflects on the conditions for creating nature in the faceof ecological crisis.

Urte Stobbe filters out ecological thought in Grimms' Fairy Tales and thenanalyzes the intertextual references to fairy tales in the example of ChristaWolf's novel Storfall (Accident, 1987). In the first part, the article extracts"green" motives, images, and imaginations of Grimms' fairy tales that arestill popular in German culture, albeit several fairy tales derive from a broadEuropean oral and written fairy tale tradition. In the context of ecocriticism,it is of interest that popular fairy tales reveal the idea of a wisely acting andhelpful nature in response to good human behavior toward other beings, butthey also show the possibility of nature's revenge in case of human's miscon-duct and disrespect of her. Fairy tales usually feature a clear moral messagethat makes them attractive also for authors of 1980s literature in environ-mental respects. Stobbe demonstrates by the example of Wolf's Accidentthat Grimms' Little Brother and Little Sister and The Three Little Men in theForest are interwoven in the text with clear moral and political intents. SinceWolf's novel raises the question of humankind's capacity of self-destmction,

Introduction xxix

especially these two fairy tales reveal a unique perspective on dealing withpeople's greed and their lacking awareness of danger, which can be seen astwo main causes for environmental problems. The typical morality of fairytales serves the first person narrator of Accident in the attempt to find a solu-tion for the "blind spot" in human culture by pleading for a more responsiblebehavior toward the human and natural environment.

From a broad background of "nuclear fiction" in German literature, Wolf-gang Liickel filters out "Cold War bunker narratives" in the 1980s as a fieldof underestimated ecological readings. Liickel analyzes bunker fiction asan extreme perspective of detachment from the outer world that shows astrong relation to increased environmental awareness and ecological disasterconcerning the risk of nuclear energy hazards, acid rain, or forest dieback.Using the examples ofFriedrich Durrenmatt's Der Winterkrieg in Tibet (TheWinterwar in Tibet, 1981) and Gerhard Zwerenz's Der Bunker (The Bunker1983), Luckel's analysis not only points to the bunker as a symbol for quiteundemocratic hierarchical power structures, but also as an inescapable darkplace like a labyrinth or a "mole maze" where life is degraded to a mere phys-ical struggle without any human compassion. Despite apocalyptic fantasies ofnuclear devastation in a cosmic dimension and the idea that "Mother Atomicnature comments its reign" (Zwerenz), the two authors hold up the possibilityof a spot of the natural world where survivors might find an ecological niche.Reading Matthias Horx's Es geht voran (It goes forward, 1982) as "an iconof 1980s popular culture," which depicts the nuclear apocalypse as a recklesslife-or-death gamble, and also referring to Gunter Grass's famous doomsdaynovel Die Rattin (The Rat, 1986), Liickel emphasizes that these two novelsplay out the tension between aesthetic pleasure and an ecological message,but nevertheless "nurture the hope for a post-nuclear society" (chapter 21) indegraded agrarian communities. Concluding, nuclear bunker narratives attesthuman disengagement with nature and look with moral impetus beyond theconfines of our own civilization.

Environmental crisis and climate change have been broadly reflected notonly in Anglophone but also in contemporary German literature. The chapterby Gabriele Dilrbeck starts with a short overview of the history of disasternan-atives, dystopia, and the apocalypse, which play a central role in recentenvironmental literature. She compares four exemplary texts: Max Frisch'sDer Mensch erscheint im Holozan (Man in the Holocene, 1979), Ilija Tro-Janow's EisTau (Melting Ice, 2011) as risk narratives and two ecothrillers,Frank Schatzing's dystopian cautionary novel Der Schwarm (The Swarm,2004) and Dirk C. Fleck's Das Tahiti-Projekt (The Tahiti-Projekt, 2006), thefictional blueprint of a social-ecological model state, both following the apoc-alyptic pattern. Although all four texts explicitly relate to the environmentalsciences, narrffle large-scale ecological changes, and critically depict human

XXX IntroductionIntroduction xxxi

dominance over the planet as the main driver of the ecological crisis, this isdisplayed differently. The two ecothrillers follow genre conventions, alertthe audience and yet prioritize reader entertainment (e.g., through suspenseor exotic settings), while the ambivalent epilogue oiDer Schwarm leaves thereader with an open moral question that reinforces the apocalyptic narrative.In comparison, the texts ofFrisch and Trojanow describe a slow-motion, per-sistent catastrophe that also becomes manifest in setting, character, and nar-rative form. They display a fragmented or cacophonic poetry which remainsskeptic about the human capacity to manage the climate crisis, either antici-pating the possible extinction of our species (Frisch), or embracing an ironicversion of a comic apocalypse illuminated through deficiencies of a morallyambivalent protagonist (Trojanow).

The fifth part, finally, is dedicated to "Ecological Visions in Painting,Music, Film, and Land Art." In the first contribution to the section, "Imagesand Imaginations: The Perception of German Landscape," Nils Buttner startswith remarks on the question whether and to what extent ecological thoughtcan be found in landscape paintings as a historical source. Assessing ecologi-cal research in art history, Biittner emphasizes the fact that visual images canoffer historical information only indirectly. Therefore, he argues for an appro-priate contextualization, since contemporary ecological thought must notsimply be projected onto historical art works of earlier times. Research has toreflect the historically changing circumstances of art production and the con-cepts of landscape perception in a respective time such as the emergence ofan art market, the function of representing land property of the sponsors, andinnovations in painting material. The construction of a national character inart historical writing has also to be taken into account. In this sense, Buttnerargues for a history of art which reflects the medium as well as the differentconcepts of landscape such as aesthetic, allegorical, or emblematic concepts,and also the theoretical discourses of a "speaking nature" or the aesthetics ofautonomy around 1800. Drawing a line from Durer, Altdorfer, and CasparDavid Friedrich, through landscape photography in the context of "blood andsoil" ideology to the paintings of Anselm Kiefer, the essay gives an overviewon central developments of landscape painting in Germany.

Among the emerging fields within the environmental humanities, thereis also ecomusicology, which considers musical issues related to the natu-ral environment. While some scholars in this field focus on "the music ofnature," others look at the inherent connecdon between humans' experience ofnature and musical composition or try to detect themes and images of naturein music. A promising object for ecomusicological studies is Ludwig vanBeethoven (1770-1827), one of the most influential German composers ofall times, known for his famous nine symphonies and many other instrumen-tal and vocal works. While many of his songs contemplate nature, the Sixth

s

IIf-

Symphony, "Pastoral," Op. 68, is his most significant work demonstrating hisfascination with nature. In his contribution, Aaron S. Alien presents proof ofBeethoven's well-known love of nature as it is traceable in his biography, inhis music, and in his reception. First, he demonstrates that Beethoven's fre-quent retreats to the countryside were essential for his creative process, thenhe offers a panoramic overview of the works reflecting nature in various ways,before he knowingly shows seven musical features of the Sixth that show itspastoral traits including its programmatic elements, and, finally, he discussesthis work's international reception. Although Beethoven was no proto-ecolo-gist, since his love for nature was rather personal. Alien argues that Beethovenhas contributed to our own understandings of the connections both betweenmusic and nature and between German culture and ecological thinking.

In Anglophone academia, Green Film studies have begun to emerge inthe past few years, but German cinema has so far largely been neglected.Therefore the essay by Matthias Hurst is one of the first attempts to detectecological thought in German film, focusing on fictional films and TV pro-grams. Following an introduction that distinguishes between "environmentalfilms" and "ecocinema"—only the latter one explicitly reflects upon ecologi-cal problems, tries to raise awareness and to transcend the anthropocentricview with experimental "non-narratives"—this essay explores the specifi-cally German traditions of Heimatfilm and Bergfilm, German western filmsand "Green" films since 1970. In the early twentieth century, at the begin-ning of the film era, depictions of a beautiful countryside and a harmonioushuman-nature-symbiosis already served as contrast to a corrupt, immoralurban society. However, the reception of German film produced in the 1920sand 1930s is overshadowed by the fact that appreciation of nature and home-land were associated with a patriotism that was difficult to distinguish fromnationalism and racism, which is why the Heimatfilm was successful in theThird Reich. Even in the postwar era, the genre disguising the realities of adefeated and destroyed country was still very popular and has been ignoredby scholars for a long time for its ideological potential, while it offers morethan escapism and mindless entertainment, as Hurst argues with reference toexamples from the New German Cinema movement of the 1960s and 1970sand to what could be even called "Anti-Heimatfilme." Like German westernfilms they touch upon ecological issues even without explicit ecological mes-sage, as Hurst observes. He furthermore discusses a selection of aestheticallyinteresting recent productions that successfully merge the genres of Heimat-film, Bergfilm and Western, and thus continue the rich tradition of depictionsof nature in German cinema.

In his chapter on "Landscape Architecture inspired by Land Art andEnvironmental Art," Udo Weilacher addresses a highly relevant topicin the discoufse on landscape architecture. First, he focuses on the close

xxxii Introduction

interrelationship between American and European developments in the fieldsof landscape planning and Land art movements. He shows that the originalconcept of Land art was not connected to ecological notions: while youngartists rejected that their art became an object of speculation und consump-tion, they created new forms of art called "Earthworks," which were faraway from society and inaccessible for actors of the art market. In the early1970s in Europe, Nature Art became popular, which was, unlike Land art andEarthworks, clearly ecologically oriented, though incoherent as a movementand in style. The concept of Nature Art is marked by a silent dialogue withnature, a meditative activity working with footprints, stones, wood, or sand,dealing with transience as a temporal process, and based on a sensitive under-standing of environment. In the terms of Hartmut Bohme, the perception oftime demands a different relationship with time, and in line with UmbertoEco, art opens new possibilities to see the world. Weilacher also discussesMinimal art which seems to look quite similar to Land art, but is rooted indifferent historico-cultural contexts and has no ecological concerns at all. Forthe mid-1990s, he points to the acceptance of decay and erosion as aestheticphenomena in landscape architecture. A third strand is the rediscovery ofromanticism in the sense of regressive tendencies to a romantic understand-ing of nature. Recent projects of landscape planning still show traces of thesedifferent movements.

It is our hope that this collection will help more firmly to establish the eco-critical paradigm in German literary and cultural studies; that it will advanceteaching and research in this area; that it will encourage cross-disciplinaryconnections between the areas addressed in the various chapters; and that itwill help inspire scholarly explorations beyond the scope that can be coveredwithin the limited framework of a single book.

We would like to thank the general editor, Douglas Vacoch, and the Edito-rial Board of the Lexington Ecocritical Theory and Practice series for accept-ing the book for the series. We also want to thank the authors for havingsupplied such substantive, state-of-the-art contributions on their respectivetopics. Finally, we want to say special thanks to Madeleine Gange and JonasNesselhauf from Vechta, Anna Rauscher, Carolin Gluchowski and CarinaEngel from Freiburg, Anna Rauscher and Carina Engel from Freiburg, andJessica Friedline, Theresa Schwaiger, and Andreas Tschierse from Augsburgfor their invaluable help in preparing the book for print.

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